“I have not lost my mind — it's backed up in the cloud somewhere (part of it right here)!”

Web Roundup 2015-01-24

Stuff that caught my eye from around the web – or at least around that part of it which I peruse.

The Legal Ingredients of Forced Baking – A Christian activist in Colorado ordered a cake with an anti-gay message on it and was rebuffed. He filed a state anti-discrimination complaint against the bakery. I wonder whether that isn’t part of a clever legal strategy. It is almost inconceivable that the baker would actually get penalized in today’s climate for refusing to bake a cake that looks like a Westboro “Baptist Church” placard — but if Mr Jack’s complaint is rejected it would effectively weaken the case for future complaints by gays and might even provide grounds for an appeal in the earlier bakery case …

The Great Charter at 800 — Roman Catholic archbishop of Philadelphia Charles J. Chaput on the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta.

Downtown Abbey — What Are Americans Really Watching? — Albert Mohler of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. comments on the popularity of the TV series, and how it depicts a major shift in British and indeed Western society and its mores, towards the secularism that dominates today.

Niger: 72 Kirchen zerstört – wegen Karikaturen — An Open Doors Germany report on the destruction of over seventy churches in the African country of Niger in response to the most recent Charlie Hebdo cover. This is the responsibility of those who committed this violence, and of the preachers of hate who incited them; but the makers of Charlie Hebdo must live with the question their own conscience poses (if they have not completely suppressed their conscience) to what extent they share responsibility for that sort of thing: whether their right to draw and write whatever they want is worth the lives destroyed.

Christian Man to Pregnant Girlfriend: Convert to My Religion or Have an Abortion — THIS is NOT how to be pro-life. But it would be too easy for us to say, “This guy is not a Christian!” He is certainly a sinner, and a poor testimony, and he is as much to blame for the death of his child as his girlfriend or the abortionist. But he may well be a Christian. There ARE lousy Christians, Christians who are (pardon the expression) assholes. Let’s hope he used the ten years gone by since this happened to repent and make things right, as far as he is able.